Crash

At the most in-opportune moment possible, the hard disk in my laptop decided to crash. 2 days before a deadline, and the week before various major assignments converged, it decided to give up the ghost. I had backups of most things, and I managed to get a couple of files off before it finally completely died, but nevertheless, there was a certain emotional element to my digital life dissappearing, just like that.

The process to try and resurrect it involved both pushing the cover, shocking it – bashing against the table, with increasing violence – and freezing it. No luck. The data was well and truly gone. I lost my Lightroom catalogue (ie, picks, metadata, adjustments), although thankfully not the photos themselves, as well as various smaller things.

I still cling to the dead HD and the lost data within, even though I know I won’t get it back. Somehow, it’s in there somewhere.

On the plus side, I now have a spacious 320gb HDD spinning inside my thinkpad, replacing the 100gig I had before. Mostly empty at the moment, of course, but that won’t last.

As an aside – there were a couple of QR codes (or similar 2D barcodes) on the surface of the hard disk casing. On the same component, so they weren’t there to stream parts together from different factories. Signs that they passed certain tests? quality control? different stock management systems with different codes?They intruiged me.